Monday, April 16, 2007

More Hijab Madness From Quebec

Yesterday evening I wrote that, in this particular instance, I had a certain amount of sympathy for the TaeKwan Do tournament organizers who banned a team of hijab wearing girls for "safety reasons". However, as KNB pointed out, the team was wearing "sports hajibs" (pictured left), and in any case helmets cover the garment so there is no risk of it coming loose, or being used to choke the competitor. Furthermore, it takes the tournament referee about three sentences to undermine his own stated rationale:

International referee Stephane Menard said on Sunday that the decision was made for safety reasons, and that it came out of a referees' meeting in Longueuil earlier in the day.

Menard told the Canadian Press that the hijab isn't included under the equipment allowed under World TaeKwon Do Federation rules.

"We applied the rules to the letter," he said.

Well, which is it? Was the team banned because of safety considerations, or because the organizers scoured the rule-book until they found a reason not to include them?

Yo Quebec: "reasonable accommodation" does not mean immigrants should have to accommodate themselves to being hassled because they're Muslim.

PS. The girl in the photo at the top of the post is, I think, wearing a sports hijab under her helmet. In any case, here is a picture sans helmet. Not sure it does much for me aesthetically, but...

There have been too many stories like this coming out of Québec to think this isn't really anything other than a defense against what the pur laine think is a challenge to the "look and feel" of it (my) culture. It's the same kind of push for homogenisation and cultural preservation that prevented people from openly disliking Céline Dion earlier on, when she could have been stopped.

Instead of bowing to this chauvanistic and repressive ideology of making WOMEN cover themselves to that men aren't, um, 'tempted', let's take a different perspective. Let's say that all Muslim MEN should be mandated to wear a new religious symbol, called a blindfold, when out in public so that they will not be tempted. After all, they are being tempted by not only Muslim women.

They would be required to wear the blindfold as a sign of their devotion to their faith at all times in public, unless they are accompanied by a female relative or female family member. They would of course then need to be driven everywhere by women, and of course they could not work anywhere except the home where they could remove the blindfold.

Why stop at muslim men? Why don't we put blindfolds on all men, so that rump of them (social conservatives) don't freak out and go balistic when they see cleavage, bare mid-rifts, upper thighs and...dudes kissing?